Stuart M. Shieber

Profile

Stuart Shieber is a computer scientist whose primary research area is computational linguistics, the study of natural language from the standpoint of computer science. Research in the field pursues both scientific and engineering goals, undergirded by foundational formal and mathematical tools. Professor Shieber works on all of these aspects of the field.

How natural languages are structured to permit efficient communication is a difficult and multi-faceted question, involving issues in linguistics (the syntactic and semantic structure of natural languages), theoretical computer science (the inherent complexity of aspects of human language); computer systems (in connection with the design and deployment of algorithms for natural-language analysis and generation); psychology (human sentence processing and misprocessing); and artificial intelligence (the encoding of general knowledge and its application to the understanding of utterances).

To answer such difficult questions, Shieber synthesizes knowledge from several of these fields. In work on the computational properties of grammar formalisms — formal metalanguages for specifying the syntactic and semantic structure of natural languages — he uses techniques from theoretical computer science to analyze the expressivity and computational effectiveness of the formalisms, and builds on algorithms from the field of computer systems. (Such studies can shed light on computer languages as well as natural languages. For example, they reveal some deep similarities between the grammar formalisms proposed for natural languages and the static semantics of programming languages.) In his research on psycholinguistics, a simpler model of human misparsing of sentences was developed by applying technology from the efficient parsing of programming languages. Similarly, his research on semantics has made use of the technology of higher-order logic to explicate the workings of elliptical constructions of natural language. His current research on synchronous grammars for describing the relations between languages has application in a variety of natural-language-processing areas, such as machine translation and sentence compression.

Beyond computational linguistics, Professor Shieber has attacked problems in a wide range of other areas as well, including such varied topics as

automatically laying out charts, maps, and other informational graphics;

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Annual Meeting of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, International Conference on Computational Linguistics, International Logic Programming Symposium, International Workshop on Machine Learning, Joint International Conference and Symposium on Logic Programming, Meeting of the European Association for Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Understanding and Logic Programming Workshop, North American Conference on Logic Programming, Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, USENIX Conference, Workshop on Tree-Adjoining Grammars and Related Frameworks (TAG+).